There's that chuckle again.

"Do not be alarmed. Personas are personalities that exist within you. Thus, you will only be discarding old personalities to have them be reborn as new ones."

He waves a hand.

Justine and Caroline open a set of curtains behind Igor, revealing another room where two enormous guillotines stand.

"By discarding your old identity, you give way to a new one. Hence, we call that process 'execution'. Think of it as the fusion of your Personas."

Yeah, no, that's absolute bullshit. 

"Like hell I'm letting you execute Julie, 'just a personality' or no."

"Oh?" He spreads he hands broadly.

"Fusion is an essential method of unlocking your power, and reaching the full breadth of the Personas you can wield. Would you discard that strength so impulsively, even given that there are methods of recalling Personas you have previously executed?"

"You're asking me to trust the warden who keeps me locked up in here over my own objections, with the life of a dear friend of mine at stake. Do you really think I'm that much of a shallow, power-obsessed bitch?"

"I think this power is the only option I know of through which you might complete your rehabilitation and prevent the coming ruin."

"Maybe I don't want to be rehabilitated."

"And yet it is your only choice. If you would just—"

A dagger stabs out of the wall behind Akira, cutting through the solid stone as if it were butter. There's a long ragged tearing sound, then a thud of a body being flung against bricks. 

The wall behind Akira's bunk collapses, and in the broken-out hole stands another Akira, in full Joker costume and mask. 

"Bullshit."

What the hell —

Igor leans back in shock. "This is quite irregular."

"How dare you break in against the orders of our master!?"

Caroline starts toward the cell.

"This is quite the breach of etiquette."

Joker stoops and shears the chain on Akira's leg in half with her black dagger, freeing her from the brick-covered bed. 

"Run for it!"

— alright, she doesn't need to be told twice. 

Akira dives through the hole in the wall.

"Come back here!", Caroline exclaims in the distance, before she's cut off as the hole seals shut.

Akira falls onto hard linoleum with a rattle and clang of the shackles on her hands. Harsh fluorescent lights buzz overhead, and the odor of blood and antiseptic fills her nose. 

She gets her hands underneath her and levers herself up — 

And Joker grabs her forearm and hauls her to her feet. She wears a heavy black labcoat that stretches all the way to her knees, her stomping boots, and her domino mask. 

"Got you."

She pulls a key from her pocket, and breaks open the shackles to discard them on the floor. "Welcome to my lair." She grins. 

Akira rubs her aching wrists and looks around at the room, not sure what to say. Her prison garb fades away, replaced with her usual blouse and skirt.

To her right there's a pair of black stone altars, blood-stained, with wicked metal clamps all along their sides —  clearly meant to restrain the unwilling. At the bottom of the beds blank medical charts rest in their holders. There's a surgical table by the near side of the altars, with a shallow metal pan containing needles, a hammer and chisel, a hemostat, a clipboard, and a pen. A long mirrored window takes up the far wall. There's no door in or out. 

Even from this distance, Akira can read the words ARE YOU READY FOR THE SURGERY on the top of the clipboard. 

Her eyebrows go way, way up.

"Okay, what the hell is going on."

Joker rolls her eyes. "I'm you. Well, the cooler you. The one who isn't afraid to get her hands dirty. The you you could be if you didn't care about so many damn rules all the time." 

She stretches and sits down on the side of one of the bloodstained altars. "This is a fusion setup. Had to make something that was the same as where you were to get there, yeah? And to be frank you're fuckin' squeamish. If you get them back afterwards and they consent to the procedure that's barely even torture. It's fucking BDSM is what it is. This is mindspace, be a little more willing to get blood on you." 

Joker twirls her dagger in one hand, then rolls her legs over the altars and sets it in the surgical tray on the far side. "Be honest. You don't care about killing Julie if you can get her back. What really rankles is that someone else would get to do it. Clinically. Like you don't know how to stab someone yourself."

She waves at the pair of surgery beds. "So I made something more visceral. You're fuckin' welcome."

Akira just stares at Joker for a long, long moment. 

"... You what?"

"You're kind of thick sometimes, aren't you? This is literally the core power of the Wild Card, being able to upgrade what kind of person you are by joining bits of yourself together in weird ways. I don't think Igor's lying about that, for all that he's a bastard prison warden. But if you wanna I can do the procedure for you. I'm you, after all. It works just as well if I do it."

Joker kicks her feet off the side of the altar, back and forth, back and forth. "Mind you, you still gotta watch. Part of the whole point is that it makes you uncomfortable. Hardly a breakdown of the self if it's all sweetness and light, now, is it?"

Akira scowls and crosses her arms. "You say you're me, but here you are saying you want to sacrifice Julie, just like Igor said. This has got to be a trick."

Joker puts her hand to her heart. "Sacrifice Julie? Hell no, never, she's her own self. But there are plenty of other personas you've collected while you were out adventuring, and those ones are much less... person-y. They're smaller shards of you. And before you say "I promised them that I wouldn't kill them" — there's a fucking consent form, I'm not asking you to coerce them." 

She picks up the clipboard and hands it over to Akira. "Here, take a look."